Epitaph For a Loved One
By Tymnes (c. 3rd-2nd cent. B.C.)
Translated by A.Z. ForemanHere lies the white dog from Malta, alone. Loyal guard of Eumelus' house, in life They called him Bullyboy. Now lost and goneHis bark is silenced on the roads of night.

How All Things Warn Of Death
By Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

I looked upon the walls of my old land,
so strong once, and now moldering away,
worn out by Time's long march, day after day,
which had already sapped their will to stand.I went out to the country, saw the sun drink up the streams unfettered from the frost,
and cattle groan how light of day was lost
to woodland, with its shadows overrun.I went into my home, but saw the crude and rotted ruins of an agèd room;my cane gone weak and crooked in the grime.I felt my sword surrendering to Time
and nothing of the many things I viewed
reminded me of anything but Doom.

Let Spanish verse turn on my tongue, affirmOnce more in me what it has always saidSince Seneca in Latin: that true dreadSentence that all is fodder for the worm.Let it turn back with song to hail pale ash,The calends of death, and the victoryOf that word-ruler queen whose footfalls smash The banners of our empty vanity.
Not that. I'll cravenly deny not oneThing that has blessed my clay. I know of allThings, one does not exist: oblivion.That in eternity beyond recall The precious things I've lost stay burning on:That forge, that risen moon, that evening-fall.

Born in 1863, Jules Boissière (Juli Boïssièra) spent his early years as a journalist, hobnobbing with the likes of Amouretti and Murras, and writing anemic verse with great virtuosity in two languages. In 1886 he changed careers, and headed for Hanoi, part of the recently consolidated territory of French Indo-China. He served in the 11th Alpine Infantry Battalion, and saw combat in some of the last few battles to conquer the Tonkinese countryside, before beginning his tenure in the French administrative corps in Saigon and Huế where he learned the language today known as Vietnamese, acquired at least a basic knowledge of Classical Chinese, and cultivated the fondness for opium for which he was to become notorious. He served a long post in Bình Định before returning to France to marry Thérèse Roumanille (Terèsa Romanilha), daughter of Joseph Roumanille the reactionary patriarch of the Provençal Félibre movement. Boissière returned to Tonkin with his wife in 1892, taking stewardship of the Revue Indochinoise. After another leave of absence in 1895, he was promoted to Vice-Resident 1st Class and died a painful intestinal death two years later. Boissière wrote prolifically, but published little during his life. He is now best remembered for his collection of French Indo-Chinese short storiestitled Fumeurs d'Opium "Opium Smokers". He also produced a sizable amount of poetry, both in French and in Occitan, a lot of which — particularly that from his later years — is extremely good. It is likely that some of his poetry remains unpublished. A posthumous collection of his Occitan verse Li Gabian "The Seagulls" was published in 1899 by his wife, who extracted the poems from among his manuscripts. Reading it, I have come across quite a few interesting pieces, the more so because generally "colonial exotic" themes are rare in Occitan literature of this period, which preoccupied itself mostly with its own soil. Like the stories in Fumeurs d'Opium, some of the poems deal with Chinese and Indo-Chinese themes. Interwoven with long odes of nostalgic yearning for his native country and rhapsodies to his fellow félibres, one finds things like an imaginative sonnet depicting a Chinese Princess reading Li Bai, or some lusciously lilting lines about stargazing from a boat gliding down the Mekong. Some are of a piece with some of the best of his French "oriental" poems such as Pays Perdu or Sumatra. And then there are three or four poems where he goes Next Level, as in the one translated here, which caught me completely by surprise. It is like nothing at all that he wrote in French that I've seen. I was not expecting this. Not even a little bit.

The Buddha
By Jules Boissière
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Our soldiers won then torched a domicile. The owner with his sons ran half a mileUnder gunfire. On the ancestors' altarNot guarding the old creeds or their old shelter,The Buddha gave the wolfish men a smile.

How many hours has it been since! Where nowIs that house? Where's the pudgy god whose brow And smile are sign of fate's indifferent law? When man beneath mute Heaven prays or criesI see again that Buddha's ruddy jaw,His moonlike face and his two tranquil eyes.

Audio of me reading this poem in Occitan

The Original:

Though Boissière was a native speaker of Lengadocian Occitan, he like the rest of his generation wrote in Provençal Occitan, specifically the variety of Rhodanian Provençal which had been raised to literary status by Mistral and others among the Félibrige movement. I give the poem in original Roumanille-Mistralian orthography, copied directly from Li Gabian, and in the more recent classicizing orthography. For all future Provençal texts in Roumanille-Mistralian orthography, I plan to include a parallel version in classical orthography.

During the Great French Wine Blight of the 19th century, an epidemic of phylloxera, a sap-sucking aphid that feeds on the root of grapevines, destroyed most vineyards and vintners' livelihoods throughout French wine-country, which included large parts of rural Occitania. Phylloxera was commonly referred to as La Bèstia "The Beast" by Lengadocian vintners. The following poem, part of a cycle about wine and phylloxera in Languedoc, is taken from Lo Gòt Occitan "The Occitan Goblet" originally published in serial installments in Le Feu Follet in 1902. The title given to this poem in that serialization is Lo Comba-Négrat "The Combnegran." Combanegra "Blackdell" is the name of a place north of Toulouse and west of Montauban. (It also leads the imagination to a dell sucked black and sparse by the pestilence of phylloxera.) When Lo Gòt Occitan was printed as a complete collection in 1903, the poem bore the title given here.
The poem's final passage evokes Cathar martyrs killed in the Occitan War, the plight of the vintner standing as symbol of a crushed and drained nation.

Death of the Vine
By Antonin Perbòsc
Translated by A.Z. Foreman And that was that. The vine was really dead.Last year in pangs the poor old shoots had spreadto ripen the last bunch each branch could yield;but now the Beast, brawling through every field,— unspeakable! — with all its mouths had struck,and sucked the last sap drop from the bled stock.

The old Combnegran, blistered by the sun and beaten by the wind since he was young,for fifty years had cut and picked each vine.Now with legs shackled and a twisted spine,for these three seasons past, a crippled manwith feet by the andirons too weak to stand,—His whole life an outdoorsman to the core —he somberly sat pondering by the door.Endlessly pondering the disastrous blight,not wanting to believe his house's plight.Oh what he wouldn't give now just to runto Peyralade where vines sipped ancient sun,to see with his own eyes — and die, maybe —the root-gnawed crop that naught could remedy.Oh, heaven had left this godforesaken earth. "Papa, today has really been the worst" A summer ago, one evening, he had heardthose words and couldn't speak. Head bowed down towardhis cup where red wine sparkled at his face,he asked no more. Said nothing. Sat in place. What had they done? Just ripped out every rootof Peyralade stock, the hillside's prize shootback when the bounteous harvests were still turning.Still a good stock these days? Well, good for burning!Whole ranks of them now, jumbled and bent double,were heaped and shucked like sheathes in fields of stubble;Then row on row were piled up and piled higheruntil they made for an amazing pyre. The sun had finished drying up last those stumps on which, in summers now long past, its beams bid bloom such luscious leafy layers.

Winter had come. One evening during prayersthe old man on his stool, head bowed with bile, chewed over bitter dreams of horror, while outside the North Wind brawled with skreaking maw. "Won't we be warm!" said his sister-in-law"We won't have wine, but we've got logs galore"and gathered stumps into her pinafore.

Oh, flames like battle-torches, log by log,lit the hearth from pot-hanger to fire-dog!The old man watched the smoking sizzling brandstossed on the fireplace twist like human hands,akin to martyrs grasping in the airfor God's aid with the fingers of despair;eyes wide, pupils dilated hideously,mouths gaping up to scream their agony,blood pouring purply from the melting skinsalvos of golden sparks crazed up to spintoward pitch night in the fire's devouring violence. And then the house was still with deathly silence.

The old man saw pass in this hellish shineall the joy squeezed out of the wounded vine. What misery now would canker in his head? He stooped. And stooped a bit more. And was dead.

After Marcabru's Crusade song, let us head to the lavador of an anti-war Troubadour. Here we have Peire's solemn reaction to a boast-poem by Bertran de Born.

First let me say a bit about Bertran's poem, which I'm not translating because I don't hate myself enough to do that. Bertran de Born was lord of Autafòrt which he held jointly with his brother Constantin. In 1182 he joined King Enric II's revolt against his brother Ricard Còr de Leon, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitania. Constantin took Ricard's side, and Bertran drove him out of Autafòrt. In 1183 in the aftermath of the revolt, Ricard besieged Autafòrt, captured it and gave it to Bertran's brother Constantin who had sided with him. Enric II however returned it to Bertran, and Ricard confirmed his father's grant. Bertran gloated and boasted in his poem of having snatched Autafort back by legal chicanery from his brother, and expressed gratitude for Enric II's willingness to suspend Ricard's law to this end. Bertran — as was his way — also beautified war in the poem, and its implements, saying things like "Qu'amb aiço·m conòrt / e·m tenh a depòrt / guèrra e tornei" (I take comfort and have a lot of fun in war and tourneying) and "patz no·m fai conòrt./ Amb guèrra m'acòrt/ qu'ièu non tenh ni crei/ neguna autra lei." (Peace doesn't put me at peace. I'm in synch with war, for I do not keep or hold to any other law.) It ends with the words "No·m cal d'Autafòrt/ mais far drech ni tòrt / que·l jutgament crei / mon senhor lo rei." (I don't give a hoot any more about doing right or wrong over Autafort, for I believe in the judgment of Milord the king.)

In 1212 Pèire Cardenal wrote the song translated here, in the same meter and rhyme pattern as Bertran's, as an appeal to Frederick the Great of Sicily (candidate for, and soon to be, Holy Roman Emperor) in which he rejected Bertran's bellicosity, and took France to task on several counts — even roping in the heroes of French epic legend like Roland, and old Frankish kings like Charles the Hammer (grandfather of Charlemagne), as well as the Burgundian Chief Girard of Roussillon.

I've known for a while that, at some point in my series of translations from Occitan, I was going to have to discuss the Occitan War (also badly and commonly known as the Albigensian Crusade). Since this poem was written during that war by a man probably privy to details of the front line as they reached the Tolosan court, it looks like that point is here and now.

Like the Battle of Roncesvaux, a minor skirmish between one of Charlemagne's vassals and some Basque guerrillas which was magnified to literally epic proportions in French and Italian literature, the Occitan War is far more important in retrospect and as a memory than anything else. Understanding the Occitan War is a bit like understanding Michael Jackson in his later years. It is best to forget everything you thought you knew.

Here are a few things the Occitan War was not.

The Occitan War was not the the main (or even a secondary) cause for the decline of Troubadour literature, contrary to popular belief and defunct scholarly opinion. Then as now, the Midi was a big place. Toulouse actually witnessed a population boom afterward, and troubadour culture if anything grew more vibrant and varied than it had been before, perhaps precisely because the status of the troubadours as a social class was much changed.

The Occitan War was also not remarkably brutal. Though terrible and destructive, as war is almost by definition, it was not unusually so. In fact as Medieval European wars go, it was more or less par for the course.

Nor was the Occitan War at all genocidal. Comparisons by modern Occitan nationalists to what was done to American Indians are a misleading fantasy.

So much the Occitan War was not. Here is what it was. It was a major blow to the political autonomy of Occitanian lords and barons, and thus may be seen in retrospect as the first stage of a long process which made a nation of France and a region of Occitania. Before the French Revolution, that process was largely unplanned. Nobody, not even the French King, in the 1200s had any idea or intent that Occitania would become culturally French, let alone linguistically.

The Occitan War was also unprecedented from the perspective of Occitanians. While similar (and indeed far worse) wars had been, and would be, waged throughout the European Middle Ages, the people of Occitania had neither seen nor possessed any historical memory of this scale of violence on their own soil. For well over a century, the Midi had been relatively placid, all told, compared to the wars that had raged to its north and south. The sort of war-making hymned by Bertran de Born in the 12th century over Autafort, though more destructive than war had been in the previous century, was relatively mild, compared to much medieval warfare. (And to a time-traveler who had seen the technologized mass-combat of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, it might not even feel like "real" war at all so much as a glorified gangfight.) The worst of war that Occitanians had then seen was when they traveled elsewhere, whether on crusade or for some other reason. And commoners seldom traveled.

It is not unlike how Americans perceive 9/11 which was, all told, not especially remarkable either in its tactics or in its body-count. The world had seen, and some parts of it were seeing, far worse than that. But 9/11 was unexpected and unprecedented and shocking for Americans, who had not seen large-scale organized terrorism, nor in fact any act of war, on mainland soil for almost a century and a half. I can say that it completely changed the trajectory of my life, as an American. (For one, were it not for 9/11, I would probably not know Arabic.) The Occitan War had a similar psychological effect on Occitanians, both while it happened and in its aftermath.

In this poem, mention of Simon de Montfort and Picards evokes Montfort's army (containing quite a lot of peasant soldiers from Picardy) which had massacred men at Béziers three years earlier, followed by a number of other acts of cruelty as part of what may have been a deliberate policy of terrorism. Peire was present at Count Raimón's court in Toulouse during the Occitan war, and would have been privy to developments on the front line as they reached the court. At the time of this song's writing, in late 1212, Count Raimón had lost control over most of his former territory. When Peire says "The Count of Montfort" in this poem, one must understand that he was talking about someone he had reason to be terrified of.

The impression I get is that Peire has in mind a takeaway something like this: "Fuck the French. No, seriously. Don't look to the damn Frogs as an example to follow. They're a barbaric, bellicose people who just like singing of war and making war. Believe me, I know. Those Frenches just love to sing war-epics about people like Roland on campaigns in the Midi. And then they come at Milord Raimón with people like Simon. And what was that asshole Bertran de Born thinking, glorifying war like that? This shit is not glorious. He didn't know what the hell he was talking about back then."

Peire, in rejecting Frenchmen as lords, is also obliquely advising Frederick not to become a pawn of Philip Augustus of France, on whose support Frederick was depending. Longobards and Lombards are here to be taken as northern and southern Italians. Sicilians are mentioned in reference to Frederick's home kingdom.

He ends with the common warning of what the hereafter entails for one who puts all their effort into worldly acquisition and none into kindness. Given that Frederick II seems to have cared for religion scarcely more than I do, I can't imagine this played as well with Frederick as Peire's trashing of the French as cheese-eating murdermonkeys.

Fear the Gallos
By Peire Cardenal
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

I take for fools the Longobards Sicilians, Germans and Lombards If they want Frenchmen or Picards For lords or friends or bodyguards. They murder and they maim And take it as a game. And I will praise no liege Who does not keep the peace. A liege would need good men to start, A harder strike than Roland's hand, Have cunning to outfox Reynart And gold to outbid Corbaran, And fear death less in war Than Simon de Monfort, Before all acquiesce To him in sheer duress.And know you what will be his share Of plundering war and bloody rain? The danger, anguish and the fear He causes. Torment, grief and pain Will be his destiny. I warn His Majesty That in the tourney lies Only that heavy prize. Man, small worth are your wit and skills If you lose your soul for an heir, Or burn in frying someone else When their deathrest is your despair, Thus you reach a threshold Where all who pass must hold The weight of their intrigues And lies and heinous deeds. Not Charles the Hammer nor Girart Not Agolant nor Marsilen Not King Gormond nor Isembart Managed to kill so many men On earth that what they got Was worth a garden-spot I truly envy none Of all that wealth they won. I believe everyone After his death holds none Of all the wealth he's won, Only what he has done.

The Defeat at Greenslope: A LamentBy Dù FŭTranslated by A.Z. Foreman (Winter of 765. Dù Fŭ writes as though he was present at the battle, although he was actually a captive behind enemy lines in Cháng'ān.)At Greenslope by the East Gate the lastof our troops were camped together

By the black pits on Mount White we watered our horses in bone-cold weather The blondhead brutes were advancing westwardpressing daily ahead Their crackshot horsemen dared to rush our men and shot them deadThe mountain in snow, the river in ice,
the wind-bleak wildland groansThat black is smoldering beacon smoke and the white is soldiers' bones If only a message had made it through
telling our boys to hold onUntil next year and not be rash they rushed and now they are gone Audio of me reading this poem in Chinese:(Modern Mandarin Pronunciation)

(Reconstructed Medieval Chang'anese Pronunciation)

Commentary

悲青坂Pi tshiengpẹ́n Grieve Green-slope

Grieving over Greenslope

In the winter of 765, government troops took a wrecking defeat from rebel forces east of Cháng'ān. Two days later, the other two divisions of the same army were defeated again nearby at an unknown location that is presumably the Greenslope of this poem. 我軍青坂 ngáa kün tshiengpẹ́n I/we army/bivouac Green-slope 在東門 dzài tongmon be-at east gate天寒飲馬 thian ghaan ìm mbạ́ heaven/weather/nature be-cold give-drink horse 太白窟 thàibẹk khot Great-white pit/pool/grotto/cave

Our encamped soldiers' were at Greenslope (Qīngbǎn) right at the eastern gate. (At a time when) weather was cold, we watered our horses in the pits of mount Greatwhite (Tàibó). The actual Mount Greatwhite is too far west for this to be geographically accurate. Possibly it is merely the white mountains, or poetic license. 黃頭奚兒 ghuangdǝu gheinji Yellow-head Xi son日向西njit hiàng sieidaily advance west數騎彎弓srú gì uạn kungSeveral horseman bend bow敢馳突káam dri-dotdare gallop rush

Blondhead men and northland lads daily pressed on westward. Several of their horsemen with bended bows dared gallop and burst (through our lines, or into our bivouac, or out of nowhere)

L3: The rebels are portrayed as non-Han, in terms typically used for barbarian peoples. The leader of the rebels, General Ān Lùshān, was of Sogdian and Turkic descent. In some societies, such as in Western Europe and the Middle East, descriptive terms for ethnic others often highlight skin-color. But the analogous terms in Chinese tend to refer to hair color, eye-color, hirsuteness or nose-shape. The "blondheads" are Khitans.The 奚 ghei (modern pronunciation Xī) were a northern tribe in the area where Ān Lùshān had originally been stationed.

L4: 突 dot "burst through, bust in" or "rush" has a strong sense of sudden ambush as used here. (This graph is also used to write the related word thot "suddenly, without warning.")

The mountain: snowy. The stream: iced. The (uncultivated) plain soughs windy-bleak. The grue there is beacon smoke, and the white is (men's) bones. L5: Qiu's edition gives 晚 mván "evening" for 野 iá "uncultivated plain, waste" on the authority of Fan Huang. L6: Use of 青 tshieng "grue" (see here on what I mean by "grue") and 白 bẹk "white" repeats the color words from the place names of the first verse (Greenslope and Greatwhite Mountain.) In so doing Du Fu perhaps also draws the Táng listener's attention to the fact that 骨 khot"pits, grottoes" of Mount Greatwhite are pronounced nearly identically to 窟 kot"bones." As the colors mentioned in the first verses come to be reinterpreted in terms of war and death, so too the "pits of mount greatwhite" 太白窟 thàibẹk khot prefigure in retrospect the "enormous white bones" 大白骨 tài bẹkkot of the dead. A further point: in Chinese literature, 青 tshieng is the color of spring and growth, whereas 白 bẹk is the color of autumn and death. Use of 青 tshieng to refer to the color of smoke is not unheard-of, but I detect also the sense that the war-beacon smoke is still "fresh" since the beacons are still smouldering. Everything around is dead.There are two possible variants of this line. One with 是 zyì "be" as the seventh character, and one with 人 njin "man". All the Song editions have 人. The only warrant for 是 lies in Qiu's edition of 1703, based on the fact that Fan Huang's anthology contained it. I think I just have to take his word for it. Looking at the two possibilities, my instant gut feeling was that 是 was original and that the version with 人 was a later "correction." The repeated use of 是 as a copula would have had a colloquial flavor. (The more classical sense of是 is as a demonstrative "this"). While it is easy to imagine how the text might have been changed in transmission to 人, it is much harder for me to imagine how the reverse might have happened. 焉得附書 antǝk bvù syü How-can send letter與我軍iǘ ngáa küngive our army 忍待明年njín dài mengnianEndure wait next year莫倉卒mbaak tshaangtshotnot rush

Would that a message could have been (or: might be) sent to our troops, telling them to bear the wait until next year, and not be rash in rushing.L8: 倉卒 tshaangtshot means "be hasty, go off half-cocked, go harum scarum" and is spelled phonetically with loan-graphs from (etymologically) unrelated words. 倉 tshaang means "granary" on its own and is used here (as in many other disyllabic words that begin with tshaang-) purely to spell the sound of the first syllable of the word. The last graph 卒 is also a phonetic loan-speller for the morpheme -tshot. (When used as an independent unbound word, tshot "abruptly" would normally be spelled 猝.) But the fact that 卒 is normally used to spell the words tsot"group of people, soldiery, army" and tsut "finish, die" is hard to ignore in this context. Perhaps it was equally hard to ignore when this poem was read (though when chanted or recited this wouldn't necessarily come through.)